Schroedinger's civilization

Niall Ferguson in one of last year’s Conversations with Tyler: The epistemic problem, as I see it is — Ian Morris wrote this in one of his recent books— which is the scenario? Extinction-level events or the singularity? That seems a tremendously widely divergent set of scenarios to choose from. I sense that — perhaps this is just the historian’s instinct — that each of these scenarios is, in fact, a very low probability indeed, and that we should spend more time thinking about the more likely scenarios that lie between them.

Continue reading →

Found on Mastodon via @m_clem@econtwitter.net, a passage from The Enchiridion by Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758.

What a lovely sentiment to have, and not only with regards to social media.

An homage to M.C. Escher’s Three Worlds, shot at he US National Arboretum, which is another one of the spots in DC you shouldn’t miss.

So, for people new to soccer watching the World Cup, just to clarify: that wasn’t an offside, that was highway robbery.

FIFA is second only to the International Olympics Committee in corruption. ⚽️

Over the years, I turned from a book highlighter — because that is what they said you should do with textbooks — to a folder of corners and scribbler of marginalia. Here are three of my favorite mechanical pencils for that purpose. 🖋️

There is a good overview of the two ways Micro.blog can interact with Mastodon, from @pmcconnell. I much prefer the full integration (Option 2 in the text), but it looks like only Option 1 completely matches the formatting. Is that a bug or a technical limitation?

Today I found, via a (paywalled) Janan Ganesh article, an hour-long conversation between Cormac McCarthy and David Krakauer. Krakauer is an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute, where McCarthy spent some time writing. I could watch ten hours of this.

So it looks like the new Pokemon game is buggy as hell. This brings back fond memories of TES II: Daggerfall which way nearly unplayable when it first came out but after a half-dozen or so patches became my favorite game of all time.